Maintaining an open-source project

This morning I read a short article on the maintainer of GitHub desktop, William Shepherd. For some reason, I kept seeing the article everywhere so eventually I surrendered to it. The post had a number of good points but the highlight for me was the advice to anyone maintaining an open-source project:

  • Have a clear vision of what you’d like your project to accomplish and be open to refining it when it makes sense
  • Have a detailed README that includes information on how to contribute to the project, submit bug reports, and a code of conduct
  • Work hard to make your project inclusive of all people from the start
  • Make your project easy to implement by eliminating the amount of work potential contributors have to do to build and run your project
  • Don’t put the needs of your project ahead of your own

You can read the full article on GitHub’s blog.



Posted

by